This morning I hung washing out in the garden in the sunshine. It’s not what you would call summer-warm but it’s not cold either and there is enough wind to blow stuff dry. Or so I thought. Within five minutes the rain was lashing down. Well, I wasn’t going out in that to get the washing in again! Another five minutes and the sunshine was back. So the washing can stay where it is. My daughter really dislikes washing that has been rained on. It smells of wet dog, she tells me. I think she exaggerates. If the worst comes to the worst, that load of washing can simply go back in the washing machine for a freshen-up rinse.
But how does the weather chop and change so quickly. April is supposed to be the month for showers and here we are in the second week of May, with both March winds AND April showers. Crazy!
I am reading Rebecca West’s novel “The Fountain Overflows”. We must have bought this copy from a second hand bookshop as there is a price of £2.50 pencilled in on the inside of the cover. I have no memory of reading it before. Maybe it has simply sat on the shelf for years, waiting to to be discovered.
Set in the start of the 20th century, it tells the story of a family of what I suppose should be described as genteel poor. The father is the disgraced, disowned son of an Irish landowning family - relatives who occasionally, rather grudgingly help them through crises because said father is charming, talented, totally improvident and, whenever things pick up and he should earn enough to provide for his family, does odd things such as speculate foolishly on the stock exchange. The mother, eccentric, artistic, musical, keeps the family going, hand to mouth, insisting that her daughters will have a musical future. But not her eldest daughter who plays the violin, brilliantly according to the music teacher at school, and badly, without feeling, without soul, according to her mother. Cue a bit of mother-daughter conflict, not to mention a bit of sibling rivalry. The whole thing is told by one of the younger daughters: a child’s eye view of life!
Much is made of their poverty, and the mother’s perceived inability to explain their true situation to the father. Their home is shabby, their clothes likewise, their furniture too, but they have a piano for the younger girls to practise on, and the older daughter has a violin. They also have a servant, a sort of maid-of-all works who lives in. It seems that the shabby genteel had servants. It was clearly the done thing, and in his case she became a sort of extension of the family. Everybody loved her. Do people have that relationship with their cleaners nowadays?
Several decades on, Laurie Lee’s family, living in a Gloucestershire village, not quite in poverty but not in great luxury, also had a piano and a violin, but no servants. In my grandmother’s house, post World War II, there was a piano and we children discovered my aunt’s violin in the cupboard under the stairs. But there was no servant. Different times!mMy grandmother may have been described by her daughter-in-law, my mother, as a “lady” kept the house herself - cleaning, cooking, general household management.
Anyway, at one point in the novel a man, hardly a gentleman by the sound of things, is described as a “masher”. No explanation is given, not even a hint of actions which lead to his being described that way, just the understanding that a “masher” is not a good or gentlemanly thing to be. So I looked it up and found this:
“Masher
A man who attempts to force his unwelcome attentions on a woman.
A woman is approached and touched by a man in an inappropriate way. She could respond by hitting him with her purse and yelling “Masher!” "
Just think, the women who have reported abuse by politicians and presidents, actors and directors, bosses and men in positions of authority of all kinds, if they had only yelled “Masher!” at the time, a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided!
Unfortunately it’s not always that simple. I recognise that but maybe now that so much past abuse has come to light fewer women will quietly accept such treatment as “bad behaviour” but will shout out about it as it happens. Different times!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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